Jesus is recorded to have denied the epithet ‘good’ that is attributed to him by an unknown person in Mark 10:17-18 (which is retained by Luke in Luke 18:18-19):

“As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” (ESV)

Instead of accepting the title ‘good teacher’, Jesus corrects the person by relegating the modifier ‘good’ to God. He affirms that “no one is good except God alone.” Commenting on this, the Jewish theologian Dr. Joseph Klausner writes:

“That Jesus never regarded himself as God is most obvious from his reply when hailed as ‘Good master’: ‘Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, God.’… Nor did he regard himself as Son of God in the later Trinitarian sense.” [1]

Christian missionaries confidently declare to Muslims that Jesus, according to them, as a fact of history, was crucified and died on the cross at the behest of Pontius Pilate. They cite scholars such as Marcus Borg, Bart Ehrman and Gerd Ludemann who, in their quoted writings, appear so certain about Jesus’ termination on the cross. But is the death of Jesus on the stipes and patibulum truly a certain historical incident? If it was, it would have been rather foolish of the BBC to produce a documentary, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, featuring such eminent theologians as John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright with the following eye-opening narration:

“But a man nailed to a cross does not die from his wounds. He dies surprisingly from suffocation. Hanging by your arms the chest is compressed. It’s hard to breathe without supporting your weight with your legs. Overtime, the strain and the pain make that impossible and you’re unable to breathe. In the Philippines, the volunteers are brought down from their crosses within an hour. Death from crucifixion takes much longer; often, several days. The only way to hasten death on the cross was to break the legs, making it immediately impossible to support your weight, and therefore, to breathe. But the gospels are all agreed that Jesus died after only three to six hours. The crucifixion began at the third hour (Mark 15:25). Some claim that the Gospel of Luke has the shortest crucifixion (Luke 23:44-46). Matthew and Mark have Jesus surviving a little longer. The disciples wanted to take Jesus’ body down from the cross immediately, but the Roman governor Pontius Pilate wasn’t convinced that he was dead (Mark 15:44). Pilate was reassured by the Centurion, but this was the same Centurion who had earlier said, “Truly this man was the son of God.” (Mark 15:39). Jesus’ body was then laid in a tomb donated by a rich man Joseph of Arimathea. This Joseph and a man named Nicodemus came to minister to the body. “(They)…came to Jesus by night and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes about an hundred pounds weight.” (John 19:39). These accounts when viewed as an historical rather than sacred record may raise some questions: Why did Jesus die so quickly? Why did Joseph and Nicodemus take so many herbs into the tomb? So it’s perhaps not surprising that some people have even dared to ask whether Pilate was right to have his doubts– whether Jesus did die on the cross.” [1]

The Doctor Angelicus of the Roman Catholic church postulated rational argumentation for the existence of God in his so called quinque viæ (five ways). Saint Aquinas contends that with reason, one can be rest assured that God is absolutely one– the common denominator between Judaism and Islam. Although orthodox Christianity affirms the statement “God is One,” the church expanded the concept to include three persons (i.e., the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) creating what is known as the Trinity. The Trinitarians adamantly insist that to believe in anything less than the Trinity is heretical and blasphemous. In orthodox Christianity, then, the fundamental concept of God is not simply that “He is One” but that “He is THREE in ONE.” Without getting into the complexities that such a doctrine entails in this short article, it is important to note that in Saint Aquinas’s rational postulation, he comes to the conclusion that through reason, one can only reach the conclusion that God is One but never that He is a Trinity.

“As I have noted, Aquinas claims that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be arrived by reason. His consistently upheld position is that reason can lead us to know that there is but one God, though it cannot prove that there is distinction in God as proclaimed by the doctrine of the Trinity.” [1]

According to Saint Aquinas, who is without a doubt one of the greatest of Catholic thinkers hence the title given to him by Saint Antoninus, i.e., Doctor Angelicus (Angelic Doctor), the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be proven or appreciated through reason. Since reasoning cannot bring us to the Trinity, it must be correctly regarded as an unreasonable doctrine.

Some unscrupulous missionaries accuse Islam of practising exclusivity in its treatment of the downtrodden. They claim that Islam only respects those that adhere to the faith while the alleged message to all those that do not believe is “abandon all hope.” This is a complete misrepresentation of what Islam stands for and history proves such calumny to be completely false. Unfortunately, there are also some elements within the Muslim community that share the same view as those missionaries. They think that Muslims should only be helping other Muslims and non-Muslims should fare for themselves. Such Muslims along with their Christian missionary counterparts should be given intensive lessons in the history of the religion.

First, we recall the great Potato Famine of Ireland and the intervention undertaken by the great khaleefah (caliph) of the Muslims of the time the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Majid I.

In the time of Queen Victoria of England and Empress of India, Ireland experienced the Great Hunger of the 1840s and it was dubbed the Potato Famine which caused the deaths of at least one million Irishmen. News of that great tragedy reached the court of the khaleefah of the Muslims Sultan Abdul-Majid I who did not waste much time to intervene by pledging to dispatch a humanitarian aid in the amount of 10,000 sterling pounds (equivalent to 1.7 million USD today). Hearing of the sultan’s proposal, the Queen of England chose to disrupt the aid by requesting that the Sultan reduce the amount to a meager 1000 pounds under the excuse that 2000 pounds had already been sent by her. The sultan acquiesced to Victoria’s intervention, but in secret, he sent five ships loaded with food. The English military tried to intercept the ships, but they safely reached Drogheda harbour and the aid was successfully distributed among the famine-stricken Irish. [1]

The celebrated Catholic Benedictine theologian and philosopher Saint Anslem of Canterbury proposed a fine ontological argument that God is “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” In other words, any candidate that is placed on a pedestal can only pass off as the ultimate and true God of the universe if he can be demonstrated to be the greatest there is. Should it be demonstrated that anything else is greater than said candidate, then he is disqualified as the one and only true God of the universe.

Putting Jesus Christ of the New Testament to the test

“…the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28)

In the above quotation, Jesus himself declares his inferiority to another and according to Anslem’s ontological argument, Jesus completely fails the test of incomparable greatness.

To reconcile the difficulty above, the evangelist will appeal to the Kenosis theory, which says that during Jesus’ earthly ministry he “emptied himself” of some of the divine attributes he had prior to his incarnation. So the argument has it that Jesus in his true and actual form would be absolutely equal to the Father in every manner and in every way. This trinitarian supposition is completely falsified by 1 Corinthians 15:28:

“And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”

The Kenosis of Jesus supposedly only spans between Mary’s conception of Jesus up to the point where Jesus suffers death on the cross. According to the Kenosis theory, Jesus receives back his full glory upon his resurrection but according to 1st Corinthians 15:28, which is post-resurrection, Jesus remains ultimately inferior to God, who is, in the end, above every single thing including Jesus. Once again, evidently, scripture in tandem with Anselm’s ontological argument lead us to the undeniable Islamic conclusion that Jesus is not God.

Dean at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Keith Fullerton Nickle informs his readers that the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are anonymous literature. We simply have zero clue who wrote them.

“We must candidly acknowledge that all three of the Synoptic Gospels are anonymous documents.” [1]

The names given to the four gospels that everyone takes for granted were actually imposed upon documents that were literally nameless. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were names that were forced upon the documents by unscrupulous persons such as Iranaeus, who according to G. A. Wells was about the first individual to designate the gospels with those four apostolic titles which would have certified those anonymous documents, as was the patristic intention, as apostolic hence making them authoritative as divine scripture. Noting this most important point, Senior Lecturer in Studies in Religion at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Dr. Rick Strelan writes:

“The Gospels are anonymous texts — to say it again — but later authority issues among Christians forced them to identify Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as authors of the Gospels, and, in turn, to associate these names with apostolic auhority.” [2]

The late Jesuit priest Father Daniel J. Harrington, who was Professor of New Testament and Chair of the Biblical Studies Department at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, has it that:

“All four of the Gospels are anonymous, that is, they themselves do not tell us who their authors were. The Fourth Gospel indicates, as we shall see, that “the disciple Jesus loved,” who figures prominently in the second half, was responsible for this Gospel, but even he is anonymous. In the second century the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached to the Gospels, and near the end of the century John was identified as the Apostle John. It is unlikely that the Fourth Gospel as we have it was written by an apostle, but it may embody a tradition of interpreting Jesus that originated with an apostle, and of course we can neither prove nor disprove that it was John.” [3]

In recent times, works such as Christoph Luxenberg’s Die syro-aramaische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlusselung der Koransprache (The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran) have emerged that Christian missionaries feel pummels forward their agenda against Islam. Luxenberg’s proposal is that the Qur’an is not completely in Arabic but contains words, phrases and expressions in the Syriac language. Picking up on such views, the Christian missionary thinks he has found the silver bullet to end the Qur’an once and for all. Arguing that since the Qur’an is not in plain Arabic, the Qur’an fails on its own testimony:

إِنَّآ أَنزَلۡنَـٰهُ قُرۡءَٲنًا عَرَبِيًّ۬ا لَّعَلَّكُمۡ تَعۡقِلُونَ

“Indeed, We have sent it down as an Arabic Qur’an that you might understand.” (Surah Yusuf, verse 2)

Luxenberg’s work may seem rather impressive at first glance and the missionary argument may seem potent too, but sadly for both of them, they are horribly and embarrassingly wrong.

Yes, the Arabic Qur’an does contain foreign words that are not just taken from Aramaic but many other different languages as well. By Imam al-Suyuti’s count, the Qur’an incorporates vocabulary from eleven languages that includes Ethiopic, Greek, Persian, Indian, Syriac (Aramaic), Hebrew, Coptic, Nabataean, Turkish, Negro and Berber. Does this impressive list shakes the belief of the Muslim that the Qur’an is inimitable? Long before Luxenberg, whoever he is (the name is actually a pseudonym), was born or his great great great great grandmother was born, the polymath and prolific scholar of Islam Imam Jalaluddin al-Suyuti in the 1400s had already critically looked at the Qur’an and collected, classified and discussed the so called “foreign vocabulary” of the Qur’an. In fact, he wrote complete works on the subject such as ‘ al-Muhadhdhab fima waqa’a fil Qur’an min al-mu’arrab’ (The emendation regarding the foreign words and phrases in the Qur’an) and ‘Mutawakkili fima wara fi al-Qur’an bi al-lughat al-habashiyya wal farisiyya wal rumiyya wal hindiyyah wal siryaniyya wal ibraniyya wal nabatiyya wal qibtiyya wal turkiyya wal zanjiyya wal barbariyya’ (My reliance concerning words in the Qur’an in the Ethiopian, Persian, Greek, Indian, Syriac, Hebrew, Nabataean, Coptic, Turkish, African and Berber languages). Not only did he show that the Qur’an contains words that come from Aramaic, but that it has words from ten other languages too! And that certainly did not shake his belief in the inimitability of the Qur’an as he continued to write hundreds of other books and treatises on numerous different subjects of all branches of Islamic knowledge. But since the Qur’an has all these foreign words from many foreign languages, does it not in fact contradict Surah Yusuf, verse 12 above?

In linguistics, we have this phenomenon called ‘loanwords’ and that simply means that a language borrows words from another language or other languages and the speakers of that language use those “foreign” words as they speak their language. This rather basic definition informs us that once a word from one language is incorporated and is assimilated into another language, it becomes the property of the latter. And so, when an English man says “The Liverpudlians ran amok”, he is speaking perfect English and no fool would come up to him and ask, “Why are you speaking English and Malay in one sentence simultaneously, sir?” The word ‘amok’ is perfectly English even though it is borrowed by the language from the original Malay word ‘amuk’ which means “attacking wildly”. A novice of linguistics knows full well that the vocabulary of any language is built on many vocabularies of other languages. If one were to say “John read a magazine at the cafe near my house”, is he speaking English or some other language? A jester might come and say, “He is speaking Old English, proto-Germanic, Old Frisian, Old Norse, Dutch and Slavonic…” And that’s just for the word ‘read’. Is that how we think about speech and language? Of course not. The basic rule is thus: “A word belongs to that language as long as it is intelligibly used in it by its speakers.”

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Is the New Testament 100% God’s word?

"Our main sources have to be treated with caution, however. There are discrepancies between Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. The Acts and the Gospels present not history but theologically interpreted history or tradition...some data may have been modified, altered, embellished or invented by the church in the oral period when its traditions were being circulated..." (Telford, W. R. (2014). The New Testament: A Beginner's Guide. London: Oneworld Publications. p. 42)

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“This is excellent. May Allah reward you.” (Dr. Shabir Ally, debater/speaker/scholar on Islam and Christianity and president of the Islamic Information & Dawah Centre International in Toronto, Canada. In an email exchange dated June.5.2011)

"Ibn, Thanks, you have done really good word against the insulting polytheism of what is called Christianity (which Jesus would not have approved)...Thanks for your good work to promote God as one Person."
(In a personal correspondence with Prof. (Dr.) Sir Anthony Buzzard of Atlanta Bible College, dated 23rd, February, 2016 regarding his feedback on my article 'Dismantling the Trinitarian perception of John 1:1')

“Anwaar’s point is convincingly right! Jesus, it is obvious, was not a Trinitarian, and it is shocking to discover that his claimed followers do not in fact follow his view of God.
Christians should be urged to affirm the creed which Jesus affirmed. I have documented your good point in two full length books: The Doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound and Jesus was not a Trinitarian (both at Amazon).
Anthony Buzzard” (Prof. Emeritus (Dr.) Sir Anthony Buzzard)

“I have visited your website and I must say it is impressive. I envy your passion and courage in spreading the words of Islam… Mabruk!!!” (Mr. Mazlan Yusof, Lecturer at the Department of English and the Department of Education, International Islamic University Malaysia)